By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

Zouhair Maalej, Department of English, University of Manouba-Tunis, Tunisia

_Contexts of Metaphor_ is offered as being at the crossroads ofsemantics and pragmatics. The book includes a Preface, anIntroduction, and four major chapters, two of which areliterature reviews of theories of metaphor past and present.

BOOK'S PURPOSE AND CONTENTSIn the Preface, Leezenberg gives the main thrust of his book,which intends to investigate the different semantic and pragmaticapproaches to metaphor, without losing sight of the contributionof social sciences, and building a case against what he calls&quot;fashionable views of concepts or categories&quot; (which is anallusion to cognitive theory of metaphor).

IntroductionIn the Introduction, Leezenberg does many things: (i) He surveysthe reasons for the relative neglect of metaphor research beforethe twentieth century. (ii) He offers a rehabilitation forsemantics as the legitimate and persuasive framework within whichmetaphor should be suitably studied. His approach is essentiallyintensional, model-theoretic as offered by Montague, combinedwith Kaplan's context-dependence. (iii) He delimits the scope ofa theory of metaphor as capable of designating potentialmetaphoric constructions, their recognition, the rules involvedin their interpretation, their truth value, their indeterminacy,and the place of metaphor within linguistic theory. (iv) Heoffers a syntactic (as predication) and semantic (as informativedescription) account of metaphor. (v) He provides an overview ofthe many theories of metaphor, and offers his own classificationof these theories into referentialist, descriptivist, andconceptualist. (vi) He ends the Introduction by giving the broadoutline of the book.

1. Chapters from the History of MetaphorIn Protohistory of Metaphor, Leezenberg argues thatcategorisations or classifications in illiterate societies&quot;reflect the social order rather than any inherently cognitiveprocesses&quot; (p. 18), and that what seems to be metaphor foroutsiders is non-metaphor for these societies. Extrapolating fromfindings in this connection, what creates a metaphor for them is&quot;the context of utterance, rather than abstract categories ormappings between conceptual domain&quot; (p. 27). The Aristotelianview of Metaphor is argued to be more conceptual in the Poeticsand more pragmatic in the Rhetoric, but less referential thanusually believed. Leezenberg documents the fact that in no timehad Aristotle had a view of metaphor in terms ofliteral/metaphoric dichotomy, embellishment or deviance.

Focusing his comments on Mysteries of Eloquence, Leezenbergargues that Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani expresses a philosophical andtheological view of metaphor and its relation to comparison. Al-Jurjani's shying away from a falsehood view of metaphor ismotivated by theological and linguistic considerations. The Koranbeing full of metaphors talking of Allah, a view of metaphoralong untruth and falsehood would have been utter blasphemy. Al-Jurjani's theory builds on perceptual and intellectualcapacities, and although he seems to have had no access to Greekphilosophy in his writings, his conception, like that ofAristotle, classified simile as metaphor-based rather thanmetaphor as simile-based.

Vico's view is presented as treating metaphor as the product ofimagination, projecting elements from the domain of bodilyexperience onto the domain of natural phenomena, which does notmake him a conceptualist in spite of his conception of languageas essentially metaphoric and owing to the simile andreferentialist view of metaphor he offers.

2. Twentieth Century Views of MetaphorCriticising the semantic views of metaphor, Leezenberg rightlyargues against the referentialists' using similarity as the onlyconcept capturing metaphor, and the descriptivists' using anomalyas a defining feature for metaphor recognition. Even thepragmatic views offered by Grice, Searle, and Sperber &amp; Wilsonare said to be no better as they actually boil down to a versionof substitution of sentence meaning by speaker meaning. Equallycondemned as problematic and bringing no solutions to theproblems of metaphor is Lakoff &amp; Johnson's theory known asconceptual metaphor.

3. Metaphor and ContextLeezenberg develops the framework in which he grounds hissemantic contextual view of metaphor, following Kaplan's Logic ofDemonstratives formulated within possible world semantics. Onthis view, &quot;metaphorical interpretations are assigned tosentences in context rather than to sentence types&quot; (p. 171).Interpretation is guided by two dimensions: a default literaldimension (di) and a metaphoric thematic dimension (dn). Under adi, &quot;This is a swine&quot; is false; under a dn it &quot;denotes theproperty of being filthy,&quot; and it &quot;is true if the person pointedat does in fact have that property&quot; (p. 172). Owing to thecontext-dependency of metaphoric interpretation, &quot;the importanceof the falsity of the 'literal interpretation' ^� as a criterionfor recognition loses in importance&quot; (p. 173). The notion ofclash or tension does not arise as &quot;the hearer has to interpretand evaluate a sentence before noting its oddity&quot; (p. 177).

As to distinguishing metaphor from metonymy and irony within thistheory, Leezenberg argues that &quot;irony or sarcasm, unlikemetaphorical interpretation, do appear to depend on previouslyestablished content&quot;. However, while metaphor is &quot;a relation ofsimilarity,&quot; metonymy involves &quot;a relation of contiguity,&quot; andmetonymic interpretations often &quot;determine information that ispresupposed rather than asserted&quot; (179). Leezenberg argues that&quot;[r]ecognition thus drops out as a necessary first step inmetaphorical and metonymical interpretation&quot; (p. 181). Talkingabout metaphor and assertion, he argues that &quot;metaphoricalinterpretation involves a change in what is presupposed, not inwhat is asserted&quot; (p. 219),

4. Metaphor, Concept, and SocietyLeezenberg makes further review of the literature for Gibbs andIndurkhya, and finds their approach indefensible, to say theleast. Other authors like Wittgenstein, Bartsch, Vygotsky,Glucksberg &amp; Keysar, and Bourdieu have been visited as a way ofshowing how some of them square little or well with his theory ofmetaphor on contextual semantic grounds. It is interesting andrevealing that this book ends with this chapter, without it beinga conclusion. No conclusion has been made provision for for atopic such as metaphor.

CRITICAL EVALUATIONAs far as my knowledge of books on metaphor goes, _Contexts ofMetaphor_ is the first in which the author gives due importanceto the contribution not only of Western but also non-Westernthinkers. The review of the various views of metaphor'srecognition and interpretation is a hard act to follow. However,Leezenberg presents two chapters totalling almost 150 pages forreviewing the literature on metaphor previous to and in the 20thcentury up to the present, going from author to author reviewingtheir views and criticising them, with one purpose in mind:showing that they do not treat metaphor as a semantic entity incontext. Under 20th century views was included Cicero andQuintilian to whom a couple of pages were devoted. Although thisis invaluable, it is available in many books on metaphor, andshould have been curtailed to make the book more enjoyablereading. Chapter four is yet another addition to the many reviewsdone in previous chapters.

(i) Criticising Leezenberg's criticismsLeezenberg presents some of the commonalities of metaphorresearch as an innovation, such as arguing that &quot;the literal andfigurative language do not involve any qualitatively differentprocesses of interpretation&quot; (p. 2) or denying &quot;that literalfalsity or anomaly can be considered a defining criterion formetaphor&quot; (p. 3). Such topics have received much debating, andare not seen as controversial anymore now. It is not clear why indiscussing, for instance, the referentialist view of metaphor,the author did not select for study those authors whosecontribution is acknowledged in dealing with similarity such asLeech (1966-1973), Miller (1979), and Ortony (1979-1994).Discussing whether the preposition &quot;in&quot; admits a metaphoricinterpretation, Leezenberg refutes that it &quot;has any clearlydelineated 'core meaning' or 'literal meaning' to begin with&quot; (p.7). For studies of prepositions in cognitive linguistics thatshowed their metaphoric dimension basically in time expressionsas a form of mapping from spatial meanings, the author isreferred to the huge literature on the subject (e.g. Jackendoff,1983; Langacker, 1984-1986-1987; Cienki, 1989; Sweetser, 1990(which is listed in the bibliography); Boers &amp; Demecheleer, 1998;O'Keefe, 1999, etc.).

Commenting on the Lakoffian framework, Leezenberg (p. 16) arguesthat the view of metaphor as mapping between two domainspresupposes a &quot;literal domain.&quot; The author's attention is drawnto the fact that Lakoff &amp; Johnson's framework builds on theconceptual metaphors present in cognition that govern a multitudeof linguistic metaphors. Such a body of metaphors basically drawson everyday life metaphors (some call dead metaphors or idioms)English people live by for which there are no literalcounterparts. In this connection, the author is referred to thehuge literature on emotion, event structure metaphor, and otherabstract concepts, which have been studied in cognitive semanticsas having no literal counterpart at all (K�vecses, 1993-1995-1999-2000; Lakoff, 1987-1993-1996a-b; Lakoff &amp; K�vecses, 1987;etc.). Furthermore, the Lakoffian framework, unlike others, doesnot posit that metaphor is a product of an anomaly vis-�-vis alinguistic or other norm.

Some statements about cognitive semantics are undocumentedovergeneralisations that reject a body of research that is notfully coincident with the way the author describes it. In hiscriticism of conceptual metaphor theory (and in particular, thenotion of meaning, culture, imagination, and rationality),Leezenberg restricts it to three publications by Lakoff &amp; Johnson(1980), Lakoff (1987), and Johnson (1987). The author's attentionis again drawn to subsequent publications (prior to thepublication of his own book) by the same and other authors (onmeaning, see Gibbs, 1999b and Lakoff &amp; Johnson, 1999; on culture,see Lakoff &amp; Turner, 1989 and Lakoff &amp; Johnson, 1999, and Gibbs,1999a; on imagination, see Johnson, 1993; on rationality, seeLakoff &amp; Johnson, 1999.).

Commenting on the distinction between linguistic and conceptualmetaphor, Leezenberg argues that it is &quot;counterintuitive to treatthe more abstract as making the less abstract possible&quot; (p. 143).The author may need to know that conceptual metaphor is not meantas an interpretative strategy to linguistic metaphor as much as away of capturing the source of mapping used in the linguisticmetaphor. Conceptual metaphor is more a metalanguage for speakingabout the linguistic metaphor. Another major objection to thistheory has to do with the &quot;priority of conceptualisations overlinguistic expression&quot; (p. 145). Granting that the author isfocusing, among others, on Lakoff &amp; Johnson (1980), a cleardistinction has been made by the authors between linguisticmetaphor (as used in the absence of other means to investigatethe workings of the human mind) and conceptual metaphor, which isdefinitely a clear acknowledgement of a linguistic level:&quot;Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible preciselybecause there are metaphors in a person's conceptual system&quot;(Lakoff &amp; Johnson, 1980: 6). Priority is crucial and justified.Not assuming this priority would have meant ignoring metaphorsthat are not linguistically mediated such as pictorial metaphor(Forceville, 1996), gesturing metaphors (Cienki, 1998 ; Corts &amp;Pollio, 1999); and metaphor in sign language (Wilcox, 2000),which are all evidence that metaphor is a multi-modal phenomenonnot restricted to linguistic expression.

(ii) Criticising Leezenberg's theoryA theory of metaphor recognition and interpretation organisedaround the Logic of Demonstratives is, to say the least, veryrestricted in scope as it conceives of metaphor as presupposing ademonstrative dimension. Not all metaphors involve such ademonstrative dimension. It is not clear how &quot;[a] metaphoricallyinterpreted sentence is simply true in case its subject has thecontextually determined property. Thus, there is no need for anydistinct notion of metaphorical truth or falsity&quot; (p. 174). Doesthis mean that for a metaphor like &quot;The chairman ploughed throughthe discussion&quot; to be a metaphor the chairman should have theproperties a ploughman has or a connotation of ploughing?Speaking about the application of this property in &quot;John is awolf,&quot; Leezenberg suggests that &quot;the hearer may also start toattribute other wolf-like features to John, such as his yellowisheyes, pointed teeth, and other visual or behavioural aspects&quot;(184). It seems that there is no device in this theory thatfilters out the entailments of the metaphor that are not salientto the target domain, although &quot;thematic dimensions&quot; are invokedas playing such a role (p. 224). Those properties as derived byassociation or connotation are not semantic but pragmatic innature. There is a host of metaphors known as synestheticmetaphors (such as the meat smells high, loud colours, sweetmusic, black mood, etc.), which can be set as counterexamples tothis property seeking strategy (Taylor, 1995: 139). It is justnot self-evident by what mechanism the property in question isarrived at, applied, and restrained, because this is pivotal forboth the recognition and interpretation of the utterance as ametaphor. If it is legitimate to suppose that the metaphoricinterpretation is unmediated by the literal meaning, how is theauthor going to preclude the notion of clash or tension fromarising, if psychologically it does arise in the mind ofinterpreters?

In distinguishing metaphor from metonymy, Leezenberg correlatesmetaphor with similarity and metonymy with contiguity. In manyplaces in his criticism of other theories, Leezenberg repeatedlymounted a case against similarity as a ground for metaphor,arguing that it is one of the &quot;obvious pitfalls of areferentialist theory&quot;, of which Jurjani was said to have steered(p. 48). Elsewhere, he wondered &quot;what theoretical gain is made byreducing metaphor to similarity&quot; (p. 73). Elsewhere still, heargues that &quot;similarity cannot serve as a primitive notionexplaining, or reducing, the figurative element in metaphor&quot; (p.77). Isn't this denying to others what one allows oneself to do?Metonymic interpretations are said to often &quot;determineinformation that is presupposed rather than asserted&quot; (179). Thisseems to me to be another classification of metonymy as apresupposition and metaphor as an assertion. Further down,Leezenberg claims the same status for metaphor: &quot;metaphoricalinterpretation involves a change in what is presupposed not inwhat is asserted&quot; (p. 219). In yet another recapitulativeparagraph, he writes that &quot;metaphors may be used to makeassertions&quot; (p. 249).

(iii) General remarksTo end this critical evaluation, there are three minor featuresrelating to punctuation and typography, spacing, and spellingthat deserve mentioning. Leezenberg uses the semi-colon (;) wherea stop is normally expected. The other drawback has to do withspacing. In some places, no space is provided after a stop, acomma, a semi-colon, and a question mark (e.g. interpretation oflanguage.A focus of attention (p. 3), metaphorical language,or(p. 15), language;that (p. 2), general theory of language?Surely(p. 9). If a spell check had been applied properly, it would havedetected most of these, and many of the words that are strungtogether as one word would have been corrected automatically bythe word processor (e.g. languageand, p. 1; languageon, p. 3;languagemay, p. 15; languageuser, p. 18; etc.). This has been sofrequent and annoying that I have given up cataloguing it. Thepublisher should have realised this while publishing. The otherfailure has to do with spelling and grammar check. There isevidence that a grammar check programme hasn't been run: e.g.&quot;are is&quot; coexist instead of &quot;are&quot;(p. 56); &quot;he argues&quot; is writtentwice in the same sentence (p. 58); &quot;explored&quot; is written&quot;eplored&quot; (p. 82); &quot;the Assyrian belief of the power inherent intablets&quot; instead of &quot;the Assyrian belief in the power inherent intablets&quot; (p. 29); &quot;He does not explicate, however, in how fartablets were actually believed to be living objects&quot; instead of&quot;He does not explicate, however, how far tablets were actuallybelieved to be living objects&quot; (p. 29); &quot;What are we make of thissuggestion ...?&quot; instead of &quot;What are we to make of thissuggestion ...?&quot; (p. 41); &quot;the speaker doesn't mean to to expressthe judgement&quot; where &quot;to&quot; is written twice (p. 46); &quot;mostlyfounder&quot; instead of &quot;mostly founded&quot; (p. 149); &quot;appkies&quot; insteadof &quot;applies&quot; (p. 260); &quot;wate&quot; instead of &quot;wave&quot; (p. 260); &quot;makesthem corresponds&quot; instead of &quot;makes them correspond&quot; (p. 261);etc. The following is simply an ungrammatical fragment: &quot;As (2)cannot be uttered falsely in any context of utterance, and henceis logically valid&quot; (p. 152). The opposite of &quot;stable&quot; is spelledas &quot;unstable&quot; (p. 153) and &quot;instable&quot; (p. 154).

This book has offered an approach that not only did away withrecognition of metaphor as a way of evading problems, but alsooffered a view of metaphor as Demonstratives, which is hardlydefensible in light of its restricted scope. On this view,&quot;[m]etaphor is not a syntactic construction or a semantic objectof a specific nature; it is a mode of interpretation&quot; (p. 186),which is an improvement over the deviation (both syntactic andsemantic) present in many theories. However, although this bookgives the impression of dissolving the problems inherent in theintractable nature of metaphor as a phenomenon of communication,it has not solved most of the problems that it rose against anddenounced. As the author himself acknowledges, &quot;the problem ofmetaphorical interpretation has been relocated rather thansolved&quot; (249). And after rejecting every single theory includingcognitive theory of metaphor, except that of Kaplan, Stern,Vygotsky, and Bartsch for obvious reasons, the author adds:&quot;perhaps some of the difficulties noted above can be resolved bylooking at this process from a cognitive or conceptualperspective&quot; (250).